There is a particular pleasure in watching a heroine ruin her own life in the first three pages and feel only the smallest twinge of regret about it. Lady Ruby Ballimore does exactly that, dressed in a sparkling green gown she compares to tropical fronds, by announcing to a roomful of London’s finest that a marquess’s prized Greek marbles are crude fakes. She is right, of course. She is almost always right, which is precisely her problem. With that opening, Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti lays out its central trick: a love story about authenticity, told through two people who lie for a living and the one woman who can always tell the difference.
The Setup: A Forged Invitation and a Falling-Down House
After torching her father’s diplomatic standing, Ruby flees London with her two closest friends and a forged invitation to a glamorous princess’s holiday estate in Cornwall. She expects an empty mansion and a season of quiet freedom. What she finds is a derelict house staffed by people who are very obviously not servants, led by one Captain Malcolm Archer, a former privateer running a smuggling operation out of the cellars and pretending he isn’t.
Archer’s crew wants the intruders gone. They try insects. They try a counterfeit sea monster. And they try spoiled food and creaking doors. Ruby, who has reorganized worse and survived four miserable Seasons, simply rolls up her sleeves and starts redecorating. The premise more or less writes its own comedy, and Vasti lets it. The early chapters are genuinely funny, built on the gap between Archer’s crumbling con and Ruby’s cheerful inability to be frightened of anything except her own reflection in a fashion plate.
Ruby Ballimore: The Heroine the Marriage Mart Deserved
The strongest thing about this novel is Ruby herself. She is plump, blunt, and brilliant, an expert in classical antiquities who cannot stop herself from lecturing strangers about cinerary urns at dinner. She reads as neurodivergent without ever being labeled, and Vasti treats her brain as a gift rather than a flaw to be corrected by love. Watching Ruby identify a forgery by its missing patina, or transform a ruin into something livable through sheer competence, is a quieter thrill than the romance and sometimes a better one.
A few qualities that make her land:
- She is desired exactly as she is. Her body is described with warmth and want, never as a project.
- Her cleverness drives the plot instead of decorating it. She solves problems no one asks her to solve.
- Her loyalty to her friends Alice and Tamsin gives the book an emotional floor beneath the flirting.
Archer is the looser sketch by comparison. He is charming, guilt-ridden, and quick with a smile he uses like a tool, and his backstory carries real weight once you understand what keeps his ragtag crew together. The trouble is that he spends a long stretch of the middle deciding, over and over, that he must push Ruby away, then not doing it. His internal monologue circles the same drain a few too many times.
The Heat and the Honesty
For readers tracking the spice level, Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti runs warm and gets warmer. The intimacy is explicit, consent-forward, and notably tender, with a recurring emphasis on trust that ties directly into the deception plot. Archer keeps asking Ruby whether she trusts him while he is actively lying to her about who he is, and the book is smart enough to know that ache is the whole point. The chemistry sparks best when the two are sparring fully clothed in a library or on a beach, trading barbs neither one fully means.
Where the Novel Wobbles
This is a four-out-of-five book, and it earns both numbers honestly. The pleasures are real, but so are the soft spots.
- The “scare them off” hijinks fizzle early. The blurb sells a “Great Cornish Fake Off,” and that war of pranks is the funniest material in the book, yet it largely dissolves by the midpoint instead of escalating into the set piece you keep hoping for.
- The middle sags. Once the attraction is established, the plot leans on Archer’s repeated will-he-won’t-he resolve, which slows the momentum the first act built so well.
- The crew stays thin. Wall, Gerry, and Lamentation are good company, and Eugénie the forger is the most intriguing of the lot, but several of them never move beyond a single defining trait.
- The external threat is faint. The danger that should tighten the back half feels more gestured at than felt, which keeps the stakes lower than the setup promises.
None of this sinks the book. It simply means the charm is carrying more weight than the structure, and your mileage will depend on how much you enjoy spending time in this house with these people. For me, that was quite a lot.
The Voice: Adapt or Be Adopted
Vasti writes with a wit that never tips into snark. Her sentences are sensory and a little mischievous, especially when she lingers over the Cornish cove at dusk or Ruby’s catalogue of absurd ballgown disasters. The humor comes from specificity: the exact wrong fashion plate, the precise number of times Archer has been spotted on the beach. That precision is what keeps the comedy from curdling into farce. Fans of her sharper, spookier work will notice this one is sunnier and lower in angst, more summer holiday than Gothic manor.
How It Fits Her Backlist
This is the first book in Vasti’s new Flirty Rotten Scoundrels series, and longtime readers will arrive already fond of her. Her earlier titles include Ne’er Duke Well, Earl Crush, and Ladies in Hating from the Belvoir’s Library series, plus her Halifax Hellions novellas. Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti trades that series’ sapphic Gothic mood for something brighter, though the wit and the social bite carry straight over. The epilogue clearly sets up Ruby’s friends Alice and Tamsin for stories of their own, so think of this as the warm, funny front door to a larger house.
Read-Alikes for Your Next Holiday
If Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti lands for you, these pair well:
- The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton, for a ragtag crew of charming criminals and the same gleeful comic energy.
- The Governess Game by Tessa Dare, for a clever, undervalued heroine matched with a rogue who underestimates her.
- To Have and to Hoax by Martha Waters, if the bickering-as-foreplay banter is what hooks you.
- A League of Extraordinary Women by Evie Dunmore, for bluestocking heroines with real intellectual lives.
- A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Liana De la Rosa, for warmth, family, and a heroine who refuses to shrink.
The Verdict
Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti is a witty, generous, low-angst Regency romance with a heroine worth the price of admission on her own. It promises a few fireworks it never quite sets off, and the middle could lose a chapter of hand-wringing without anyone noticing. Even so, the voice is a joy, the love story rests on a clever and genuinely moving idea, and Ruby Ballimore is the kind of character you will want to follow into the next book. Come for the con artist. Stay for the bluestocking who sees right through him.